Prize-winning columnist Krauthammer

NEW YORK — Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and pundit who helped shape the conservative movement as he evolved from “Great Society” Democrat to Iraq War cheerleader, died Thursday.

He was 68. Krauthammer had said publicly a year ago that he was being treated for a cancerous tumor in his abdomen and earlier this month revealed that he likely had just weeks to live.

“I leave this life with no regrets,” Krauthammer wrote in

The Washington Post, where his column had run since 1984.

He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for “his witty and insightful” commentary and was an influential voice among Republicans.

Krauthammer was a former Harvard medical student who graduated even after he was paralyzed from the neck down because of a diving board accident, continuing his studies from his hospital bed. He was a Democrat in his youth and his political engagement dated back to 1976.

But through the 1980s and beyond, Krauthammer turned against the Democratic Party on foreign and domestic issues. He aligned with Republicans on everything from confrontation with the Soviet Union to rejection of the “Great Society” programs enacted during the 1960s.

“As I became convinced of the practical and theoretical defects of the social-democratic tendencies of my youth, it was but a short distance to a philosophy of restrained, free-market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and to the civil society that stands between citizen and state,” he wrote in the introduction to Things That Matter, a million-selling compilation of his writings published in 2013.

Krauthammer married Robyn Trethewey, an artist and former attorney, in 1974. They had a son, Daniel, who also became a columnist and commentator.